Interview:
Paul Grogan
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| Paul
Grogan. |
In this recorded interview, Paul Grogan,
president and CEO of The Boston Foundation, and co-author of “Comeback
Cities,” an
analysis of efforts to revive American cities, discusses the ongoing
redevelopment of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Mr. Grogan recently spoke
at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Comeback
Cities forum in Worcester. The Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston was a sponsor
of the event.
I think the revitalization of Roxbury is happening in the context of a city that
has enjoyed tremendous neighborhood rejuvenation. Roxbury is, in a way, the last
part of the city to be completely fixed up. We’re pretty close to reaching
a point where there is almost no physical blight in the city.
This is a stunning development if you think about what these neighborhoods looked
like in the late 1960s or mid to late 1970s, when you had weed-filled empty lots,
vacant and abandoned buildings, and streets strewn with carpets of broken glass.
This revival has happened for a variety of reasons, but I would place great emphasis
on the unusual scale and staying power of grassroots revitalization efforts in
Boston. We have a network of community development corporations (CDCs) and other
organizations that have been at this for years.
These organizations have done incredible bodies of work, and they did it a house
or a block at a time. I refer to it as a kind of microsurgery. At the time it
seemed implausible that you could ever get there, but some of us were crazy enough
to say it could work. One of the lines we used in Comeback Cities to describe
this phenomenon was the paradox of little victories, which means that once you
get enough of this going it starts to build on itself and multiply until finally
you end up with the rejuvenation of whole neighborhoods.
The physical environment has an enormous impact on human prospects. The environment
sends powerful messages to human beings, and they absorb these signals. The chaotic,
blighted atmosphere of the former Roxbury sent a terrible message to its residents.
We have also had an environment in this city where multiple sectors have steadily
supported the grassroots efforts. The banks, for example, have been actively
at the table for a long time now and understand that good loans and other kinds
of investments can be made in these communities.
The Community Reinvestment Act has also played a major role in prodding banks
to figure out how they can do business in these communities. By working with
CDCs and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the banks were able
to forge effective partnerships in these communities. They discovered over time
that while this kind of lending may not be a high-margin business, it can be
a good, safe business. I think the earlier view was that if you were forced to
do business in these neighborhoods you were going to be making bad loans and
suffering loses.
We saw the same phenomenon among the Federal Home Loan Banks (the FHLBanks).
I served on the board of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York for a number
of years, and it was a happy experience for me. The Affordable Housing Program
propelled the FHLBanks into relationships with people and organizations that
they weren’t very well acquainted with. But the FHLBanks’ funding
became part of the resources flowing into these neighborhoods, and this happened
against some real initial skepticism and resistance.
Philanthropy has also played a role in the revitalization. The Boston Foundation
and other organizations made a continuing bet on CDCs and the infrastructure
that supports these revitalization efforts.
Also playing a role was city government, which embraced these community efforts,
beginning with the later years of the Kevin White administration (when I was
the city’s neighborhood development director), and continuing through the
administrations of Ray Flynn and Tom Menino. The city used public investment
and other measures to steadily chew away at the problem.
I think it would have been very difficult for the City of Boston to have taken
steps to avoid the initial decline. There was a tremendous exodus to suburban
communities, and federal policy was very strongly tilted in favor of the suburbs.
Boston went from some 800,000 people to under 500,000 at one point, and that
was just very, very tough to cope with.
But now I think cities have the right strategy in emphasizing the distinctiveness
of urban living as opposed to trying to emulate the suburbs. We found our way
back to what I would call a Jane Jacobs model of understanding that cities thrive
on a mix of uses — on density and diverse people coming together.
Another important development is that these neighborhoods began to experience
reintegration with the mainstream economy. Over the years, they had become isolated,
and their commercial sectors had become very weak. There weren’t any supermarkets
in the city. Now you have thriving commercial districts and the return of major
supermarkets to the inner city. So it is a remarkable story, and I am old enough
now to have seen the whole thing.
I think these neighborhood revivals have also been helped by national structures
such as LISC, which accelerated the process of expanding this strategy to cities
around the country and making available to other communities the experience of
leading cities such as Boston. The community development movement in Boston has
been widely emulated in cities such as New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco,
and Cleveland to tremendous effect.
But I don’t think improving the physical environment alone addresses all
the problems of inner city life. In Comeback Cities, we also talk about the crime
picture. The fight against crime helps revitalization because chaotic environments
breed antisocial behavior. Improvements in policing practices in Boston and other
cities helped bring crime way down at a time when revitalization efforts were
reaching critical mass. I think a lot of people are scratching their heads about
the recent upsurge in violence in some city neighborhoods. But even with this
upsurge, we have not gotten anywhere near to the bad old days when crime was
really out of control and people really felt unsafe in large parts of the city.
Big public systems also play a huge role in the rejuvenation of cities. The welfare
system, for example, has been transformed, and we have made a lot of progress
in reintegrating the terribly isolated ghetto-like public housing structures
that were created at an earlier point. Public education is still an enormous
battle, and all the statistics say that many low-income kids are either dropping
out or graduating from high school without a real ability to compete in the kind
of knowledge economy we have here in metropolitan Boston.
Over the years we have also succeeded in getting a set of public policies
in place that have proved to be very durable. The Low Income Housing
Tax Credit is the most important, but others include flexible federal
initiatives such as the Community Development Block Grant program and
the HOME program. The federal government needs to learn to be a more
flexible investor in what is fundamentally a local process. It’s
a shame, for instance, that the Bush Administration hasn’t been
supportive of the Hope VI program, which has transformed public housing
in many communities. People should remember, however, that it’s
possible to make changes in current policies regardless of whether
the federal government sets the table. T |
